4 Absurdly Specific Pop Culture Questions Answered by Fans

I'm a fan of thinking too deeply about fictional characters. That's one of the very few skills anyone at Cracked actually possesses. We're about as qualified to do it as anyone who's watched the same movies and shows over and over until we have to think too deeply about them to find a new way to talk about them. Others are smart enough to think of all that pop culture geekiness in mathematical terms. They quantify the fictional because they can. That's what this article is about -- people who applied numbers, equations, formulas, and ... like charts and shit to better explain and understand the fictional characters we love. They intersected pop culture geekiness and academic nerdiness. They are nerd gods.

#4. How Much Would a Kaiju Pee?

Warner Bros.

Movies about giant monsters smashing cities and beating the shit out of each other are primarily made for boys to gawk at and wonder how big those monster penises are. Science has not yet answered how big a fake monster's dong would be, but it's found an answer to how much a kaiju would piss. In other words, the scientific community is telling us they're bored and need better things to study.

Warner Bros."Excuse me, sirs. May I piss on the charred remains of your world?"

A deep sea researcher from the U.S. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center who goes by the pen name Dr. M over at Deepseanews.com attempted to mathematically explain the eating and digestive patterns of the kaiju from Pacific Rim. He made a pit stop in their urinary canals along the way.

Everything in an animal's biology scales with size, so he used the equations biologists use to calculate how much food different types of animals need to live and scaled them up to the weights of the kaiju in the movie. It's hard to tell what earthly animals kaiju are most like, so he did the math for the likely candidates -- mammals, birds, reptiles, marine fish, and crustaceans --to cover all the bases.

The good news is that it would take 61.7 years for a single kaiju to eat everyone in Hong Kong. That's bad news for people in Hong Kong, as they are being eaten. Better them than me, I suppose. Those numbers tell us how much kaiju would need to take in, so he calculated how much piss they would pump out, assuming their digestive efficiency wasn't 100 percent. The average kaiju could hose down a city block with the equivalent of 40 barrels of piss. Assuming that it's mammalian, the largest of the kaiju, Slattern, would pee nearly 2,000 gallons a day. If it were more closely related to frogs, Slattern would piss around 1.5 million gallons a day, roughly 92 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Just for shits and giggles, Dr. M crunched the numbers on Godzilla's pee stream, using his 55,000-ton weight from the latest movie. Godzilla would pump out 12,921,400 gallons of radioactive piss a day. Pretty much enough that Godzilla wouldn't need to waste time smashing cities to destroy the Earth. A couple steady streams into our oceans would be enough to turn us all into walking malignant tumors.

#3. How Many Miles Does Mario Run and Swim Trying to Find Princess Peach?

Nintendo

For a middle-aged plumber in overalls, Mario is pretty athletic. The guy has a vertical leap that can make him a top pick in the NBA draft. And he runs and swims like he's training for a triathlon where the third sport is curb stomping. All his running poses an interesting question: In Super Mario Bros., how far does Mario travel before he reaches Princess Peach? Nick Greene over at Mental Floss took the time to figure that out.

NintendoYet no one has tried to figure out how many concussions he's had slamming his head into coin boxes.

The calculation began by trying to find a relative size for everything in the game. Assuming Mario has the body of a normal human whose stance has his feet just a bit wider than his shoulders, he would be 26 inches wide. From there, Nick measured out how many Marios each level would be. If Mario traveled directly to Princess Peach without veering off into warps or bonus areas, the total distance he'd run would be 3.4 miles. Factor in all the bonus levels, and Mario only tacks on another 0.3 miles, bringing his total run distance to 3.7 miles. Then there are the water levels, which total 1,218.5 feet, or as Greene calculated, about 7.5 laps in an Olympic-size swimming pool. With the bonus water levels included, another 344 feet are added on, bringing the total distance Mario travels in water to 1,562.5 feet, a little over a quarter mile.

Mario's epic journey through a magical land filled with villainous mushrooms, man-eating plants, and evil turtle overlords was a grand total of about 3.7 miles long. Now, let's consider that the current speed-run world record for Super Mario Bros. without mods or tricks is 4:53:69. The real-life world record for a mile run is 3:43:13, set by Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999. Mario would absolutely destroy that record back on Earth, but instead he chooses to keep rescuing a princess who by this point clearly wants to be in the cold, scaly, yet loving hands of a giant evil turtle. Mario's priorities are all fucked up.

Nintendo"What-a bitch!"

Another group of people trying to apply math to fictional characters figured out that Mario runs about 20 meters per second, and they discovered that as they attempted to answer a different question surrounding another classic video game character ...